To mark the 99th anniversary of the October Revolution on 7 November 2016, a Radio Svoboda journalist asked Muscovites who they would have supported in 1917 — the Whites or the Reds? A slim majority favoured the Reds, suggesting that contemporary Russia’s rejection of revolutions does not necessarily equate with condemnation of the Bolsheviks, architects of a plan for a new society. Several years of opinion polls bear out the result of that vox pop.

That day, 2,000 young and old, nostalgic for communism, marched through Moscow holding pictures of Lenin and Stalin, led by the current head of the Russian Communist Party, Gennady Zyuganov. Shortly before, Sergei Mitrokhin, the leader of the social liberal party Yabloko (Russian United Democratic Party) until December 2015, laid flowers outside the defence ministry and left a plaque in praise of ‘the defenders of democracy and the constituent assembly’. These men, he said, were heroes. They had taken up arms against ‘political bandits’ (the Bolsheviks), who in January 1918 had dissolved the constituent assembly (elected on 25 November 1917) because they had failed to win a majority. The Moscow authorities often ban Yabloko events and permit Communist Party marches with portraits of Lenin and Stalin. Lenin’s body remains in his mausoleum on Red Square (against his wishes), and is likely to stay there for the foreseeable future, given the fear that his removal would stir up greater controversy.

These examples show how controversial the revolution remains in contemporary Russia and how sensitive its commemoration is for the authorities. Under Vladimir Putin, the anti-Stalinist vision of the Yeltsin years has been replaced by a more positive view of the dictator’s record, but a profound rejection of revolutionary upheaval remains. In 1996, under Yeltsin, 7 November was declared the ‘Day of Unity and Reconciliation’. In 2004 commemoration of the Petrograd uprising even lost its designation as an (...)